Breadcrumbs vs. 6sense: which one is right for me?

Choosing between Breadcrumbs and 6sense? That’s a valid question! While we may be partial to Breadcrumbs, let us provide you with a fair and rational explanation as to why we think Breadcrumbs is the top alternative to 6sense.

6sense and Breadcrumbs both let you connect your tech stack to analyze your leads and customer data, create scoring models, and surface revenue opportunities.

The key difference is that 6sense is an intent data platform mainly geared toward accounts that relies on black boxes that are hard to measure and don’t give you actionable scores to drive the business decisions that power your business engine.

Breadcrumbs focuses specifically on contact and company scoring and empowers you to make the best decisions based on the most relevant data and have them implemented right away, measuring the actual performance and impact of the model across all your funnels, regardless of the data source. It is visual, and it is designed to deliver value to you right away. It is a smart system that learns over time and brings you along for the journey.

Let’s get into the specifics to help you decide which option is best for you.

Data analysis and insights

6sense is an intent platform that specializes in account-based marketing (ABM) and helps businesses identify potential customers based on their intent signals, missing out on the in-depth analysis of your contacts and integrating all the data you have that lives in all your product analytics tools.

That’s where Breadcrumbs comes in—a 6sense alternative with a built-in data sidekick for operators specifically designed by operators to make your data analysis thorough and effortless. 

Connect all your data via native integrations or our solid APIs, and start connecting the data dots scattered across your tech stack, including full hassle-free support for HubSpot and Salesforce (and many others.)

Perform complete data analysis using Explore, a feature that allows users to analyze data by viewing, filtering, segmenting, and sorting contacts and companies alike. This enables you to gain valuable insights into their customer base and make data-driven decisions. 

In addition, Breadcrumbs provides tools for scoring model creation, customer and company search, and analysis. These features enable businesses to dig deeper into their data and uncover patterns and trends that can inform their marketing and sales strategies.

We free up your bandwidth by managing all data analysis and give you actionable insights so you can focus solely on what’s essential: create, implement, measure, and enhance scoring models based on the most relevant data. 

Scoring model creation

While 6sense.com is a powerful intent data platform for predictive analytics and ABM, it does not specifically highlight scoring model creation as one of its core features. 6sense.com focuses more on account-level insights and intent data rather than individual lead scoring.

On the other hand, Breadcrumbs offers a user-friendly interface that allows for easy and intuitive scoring model creation. With its Copilot feature, Breadcrumbs analyzes data and generates suggested models, saving time and effort in the process. This automated approach streamlines the scoring model creation process and ensures accuracy.

Secondly, Breadcrumbs provides complete transparency and customization options for scoring models. Users have full access to the entire Breadcrumbs Scoring Engine, allowing them to customize the model according to their specific business needs. This flexibility empowers users to create high-performing scoring models tailored to their unique requirements.

With Breadcrumbs, black boxes are no more—with our ML-assisted approach, you have full visibility and control over the scoring models that power your business. 

Connect your data and let Reveal analyze it for you to surface key patterns in real time, then determine which attributes and actions are most important for your business. 

Finally, use Breadcrumbs Copilot to surface the attributes and actions that strongly correlate to your best customer; refine your scoring model with our intuitive point-and-click builder to quickly create and manage a scoring model that meets your exact specifications–all in minutes!

Customer and company search, and analysis

Why settle for basic contact and account insights when you can use Breadcrumbs Explore to unlock a data-backed superpower that helps you make better decisions in real-time across your entire tech stack? 

Our exploration tool enables you to view, filter, segment, and sort contacts according to attributes across your connected data sources so that your analytics process is constantly informed by the latest insights. 

You can even compare scoring outputs side-by-side and get a snapshot of trends quickly so that you can make decisions that you can trust.

It’s like having GPS navigation–a powerful asset to have when exploring unknown territory. No matter what analysis you need to do or what questions you have about contacts and companies in your database, filters, and segments will help you locate them quickly and effectively.

On the other hand, 6sense only offers basic exploration insights, making it difficult to analyze your contacts and companies effectively.

6sense is an intent data platform

6sense is an account engagement platform that uses intent data to help businesses understand their prospects’ buying readiness, while Breadcrumbs is a lead scoring tool that helps businesses prioritize their leads based on their likelihood to convert. 

Breadcrumbs uses machine learning algorithms to analyze customer behavior, and score leads accordingly, helping businesses focus their efforts on high-value prospects.

While both intent data platforms and lead scoring platforms aim to enhance the effectiveness of marketing and sales efforts, they use a fundamentally different approach. 

An intent data platform focuses on identifying in-market prospects by analyzing their online behavior and primarily provides insights about potential customers’ intent without necessarily ranking them, while a lead scoring platform prioritizes leads based on their likelihood to convert, giving you actionable insights on which prospects to reach out to and boost conversions… today.

Fit & Activity scoring

6sense scores, which focus solely on companies’ intent and activity data, do not provide a comprehensive understanding of a contact’s score.

On the other hand, Breadcrumbs provides scores for contacts and companies alike. Our co-dynamic distribution helps you gain an in-depth understanding of what makes up the score of companies and contacts by allowing you to view fit data (aka demographics and firmographics) and activity data (aka actions and behaviors) in an integrated way.

Additionally, Breadcrumbs’ clear and customizable levels of differentiation help you identify why a score is high or low and quickly act on your scoring model results.

Recency, Frequency & Time

Frequency and recency can seem complex words, but what they really stand for is giving your contacts the right score based on how recent their interactions with you were and how many times their interactions occurred in a given time period.

But that’s more to it; we call it time decay. 

Time plays a meaningful (yet often neglected) role in lead scoring, and it’s never linear. This is how time decay works in Breadcrumbs: it’s not an on-off button, but time decreases over time at a customizable rate, and your contact’s score changes accordingly. 

Contacts visiting your page 4 days ago shouldn’t get the same score as contacts who visited your page 2 months ago. In the same way, you want to know immediately about in-product activity happening today. Immediately… not three weeks from now.

Lead scoring experiments

Experienced operators know that lead scoring is critical to their success, and the best-in-class among them test and compare a variety of approaches to see what works best. 

While 6sense doesn’t offer A/B testing capabilities, Breadcrumbs lets you test multiple ideas and approaches, allowing you to compare and contrast the results using data-backed analysis.

You can separate assumptions from empirical evidence and get crucial data to make informed decisions, helping you better analyze your leads and customers and refine your scoring approach.

The key insight? It’s not about having a single generic model up and running… it’s about having several very specific ones targeted at different ICPs, motions, products, and geographies running in parallel. Breadcrumbs enables that. 

Pricing and plans

6sense offers a limited free plan, making it difficult to understand if it’s worth the cost and effort. 

Among 6sense alternatives, Breadcrumbs offers a free plan that doesn’t come with any time limitations, and it’s not bound to any tech stack, allowing you to road-test the product and fully validate if it’s working for your unique needs without worrying about costly contracts or trial periods. 

And when you opt for an upgrade, you only have to pay for the features and services you use–giving you all the flexibility you need when building your lead scoring system.

Measurement of the impact on your business

With 6sense’s black box, it is borderline impossible to have visibility on whether a model is moving the needle or even just if it’s working as intended. 

Breadcrumbs is optimized to surface exactly that information. With Breadcrumbs, besides getting better conversion rates, you can also optimize your models to: 

• Increase the volume of your leads in the top positions, 
• Decrease time-to-close velocity, 
• Increase deal’s value over time.

That’s why we designed a fully customizable co-dynamic system: you’ll quickly and effectively be able to measure all the above metrics and adjust your scoring model accordingly to double down on what’s working.

An example? You can throttle the volume of leads passed to the sales team by adjusting the definition of “A” in your scoring model. Breadcrumbs will tell you in real time how every change will impact your volumes.